DAY SEVEN

I woke up this morning to a close-up of beautiful rocks and a cut. It was brown and pretty but the camera took a picture of the window reflection instead. I was surprised to see hoar-frost on the ground. It was Nevada and I been waiting on cacti. Still none yet.

I ate breakfast with three men who were all going to different places but obviously had been riding trains for many years. One of them remembers a loop fare one could get back in the 80s-- under 300 bucks and ya could get on and off where you pleased until you came back home again. They also remember an entertainment car and free cookies and wine tastings.

None of them seemed to care any for Al Gore and truthfully I don't either. They all had some rather pithy observations about environmentalists who got the land all bound up in regulations now that in some places you have to wait a year before you can build on your lot-- having to make sure that everything drains properly. One of them says the best place to buy house and land for your buck is Colorado. That would be after retirement since there aren't any jobs there. They were a pretty interesting bunch of guys they were.

I slept after breakfast-- perhaps the french toast was too much on the carbs and not enough of anything else. And woke up to brown dirt-sand, rocks, and the same vegetation I seen since Colorado. No trees though and some of the ground has that baked-in look. The mountains look like someone just dumped truckloads of dirt onto various spots.
Gone is the snow covering that graced Utah's mountains. I'm still waiting to see cacti and sorry to say but there is none. There is still patches of tough grass snuck in among the yellows and reds of the weedy things. I have seen some ducks and a few birds as well. It's a land as rugged as Utah was salty and it must take a special breed of human to make a living here.

Trees eventually came back along with tire factories and little outcroppings of people. No real towns though. Bunches of tracks and in the distance, snow-capped mountains returned. Reno came and went. There is a river that we will follow almost to Sacramento-- the ?Kentucky? River. Interspersed farms, boulders, and scrubby bushes.
Fancy houses and broken down ranches. Wherever the luxury hotels are, they must be a ways from here. The mountains
are beginning to have a few brave trees growing on then. The one with dashes of snow to the north seems to have more trees. Just scrubs, a few trees, boulders, and bits of green vegetation. This isn't like home at all.

Blondie would like it here. Open country, space to run in, a creek, trees, places to explore. She wouldn't appreciate the scenery from the train window. She would have to get out. Pictures don't do it for Blondie. We think we are smarter than dogs and yet perhaps dogs have more the right of it. Experience, not memory. Or memory is secondary to the right here right now. Dogs would be the perfect zen masters. If the Buddha were to come back, he could do worse than coming back as a dog.

There seems to be little man-made features mixed in with the river. Timbers holding the rocks up, a concrete waterfall, fences. The day is gloomy, the river is unnatural in its greenness with white ribbons of rippling swirling currents. Purples and greens, yellows, stalky vegetation. Shrub. Piles of rocks. Sun peaking out from under the clouds. Slides and reds and tans, rocks and sand. Where is my fucking cactus???








We are entering Cold Stream Canyon. The original trees were cut down more than 130 years ago or so. We will climb 1100 feet. There's lots of pine trees here even though they are young. At the top is a tunnel and then a photo op at the top-- after the tunnel, to the right of the train. That photo-op was Donner Lake. 89 people set off for California but only 47 people made it, they were stranded for 5 months and they had come from Illinois.

We also passed a small railroad community [not to be seen] where the houses were covered so the workers could get to their houses from the station. And Soda Spring-- cuz of the presence of carbon dioxide in the water, one didn't need baking soda for their bisquits to be rising.

We also went through a couple of snow sheds-- concrete structures built to hold back the avalanches. There is snow here and it can get up to 35 feet. I'm not sure if we are still in Nevada or if we are in California. We did pass under the lifts for the Sugar Bowl. Oh, it's California. All California since Soda Spring.

California became palm trees and flowers, poppies and poplars and stuff. Clean streets and shiny people. No slums on parade via the train window. Water, a harbor, boats. White stork-like ducks, probably some relation to herons but definitely not blue herons due to coloration and the sun. Pretty, not overwhelmingly so like central Colorado. But pretty enough.

I got off the train and onto a bus. The driver was not gaining points for his ability to deal with the public. I found him to be rather gruff. He offered to "take care of" us if we would "take care of" him-- in other words, after the scheduled stops, he would take people to their hotels for tip money. I was wanting to get off the bus when at Pier 39 [a.k.a. Fisherman's Wharf] the bus driver began cussing out a Canadien charter bus driver and then our oh so slick bus driver drove over a curb to get around the Canadien charter bus. That was my stop anyways so out the door I went. I wasn't going to help dude rip off his employer.

The hotel proved to be in the financial district next to one hell of a shopping district and I am on the 21st floor. I am liking it muchly. Dinner was expensive but worth it as dinner was downstairs in the attached restaurant. I had procuitto and melon for an appetizer and caesar salad for my meal. That set me back 25.06 but I was so freaking
tired and hungry that I could not trust myself to find a cheaper place while maintaining my sanity, or what passes for sanity round here.

Now it's internet and court teevee and hot tea and bed.

sapphoq n friends